A New Name for Stack Overflow (with surprise ending)

I really wish that had been made clear from the title. I mean, I don't really see a site of their (stackoverflow.com) size up and changing their name overnight (though I could see patio11 making grabbing a second domain like AnswersToProgrammingQuestions.com), but the title had me a bit worried. It was only made worse by blog.stackoverflow.com taking it's own sweet time responding to my request.

I've long been confused about the naming of SO/SE. I mean, there was stackoverflow.com (the site), stackoverflow inc. (the company), and stackexchange. For a while I thought that the VC money was only for stackoverflow.com because of this. Hopefully the company name change will help me keep things clear in my head.

I feel like Spolsky is just doing this whole VC-backed startup thing just to see how crazy and ridiculous it is, so he can credibly make fun of it in his future writing.

Future blog post:

"We didn't even have any idea how to go beyond programming questions. Our our 'technology' if you can call it that was trivial. We had no business model. My personal job board had higher revenue. Still, these crazy guys in suits offered to give us millions of dollars at ridiculous valuations because I'm a blogging celebrity and we did what any sane person would do: we took it! It was fun while it lasted..."

I would be laughing, but I just a couple days ago I was googling for information on an actual Stack Overflow error.

So, what is the valuation of stack exchange?

I don't know if his hour-long talk at BoS2010 will get posted eventually, but a major theme was that value was shifting from creating "technology" to creating communities around a shared experience. StackOverflow is more sophisticated than the clone-it-in-a-weekend crowd gives it credit for, but even if it were Baby's First CRUD App, it would be Baby's First CRUD App Which Contributes Hundreds Of Millions In Productivity To Developers. That community and their accumulated knowledge have value even if the technology is a hacked-together Wordpress plugin (and again, it isn't).

It is an open question whether they successfully move beyond developers. If they do, gadzooks, good news for the world. There are similar expert questions with canonical right answers which are a) difficult to find at present and b) extraordinarily consequential for people.

I had two canonical examples in recent weeks on tax and visa questions, for myself and other people. Answering one took a week of research and directly lead to $5,000 in my pocket. It is ungoogleable at present. The one asked by a friend of mine is similarly ungoogleable, the right answer is easy but nonobvious and virtually undocumented, and many of the numerous wrong answers lead to deportation.